Is Google Sandbox a Myth?

seoseattle

Born

Posts: 4

3+ Months Ago

A subject deserving pages of data taken from actual SEO projects is the so called Google Sandbox. Since my duties for SEO are mounting and time for which I can allocate to this Blog is now limited, I can share only my current understanding of the Google Sandbox.

Ask almost any SEO professional and they will tell you that Google automatically penalizes and places newborn domains in a Sandbox. The idea is that with the purchase of a new domain comes with a Google Sandbox incubation period. So it goes that a domain less than 12 months old has little chance of ranking high in Google search returns. It is also said that should a recently purchased domain get lucky and rank high in a Google search that the luck will wear out sometime before its fourth month. There is strong evidence that the Sandbox does exist and that Google does filter a search return by including a check of the URL’s domain age. It seems that Google will only have confidence in a URL connected to a mature domain and only after it can show a time tested history.

I am aware that such treatment by Google regarding newly purchased domains does indeed exist. (Today anyway). During the past year I have averaged several SEO projects a month that have included working with brand new domains. I can tell many stories and share my personal testimony that the Sandbox does indeed exist and continues frequently to test my abilities and SEO methods.

That said. Let the record show that my experience is that the automatic Sandbox penalty does not always take place. I also believe that the selection of which domains to send to the Sandbox is not randomly made by Google and that Google has left a pattern of how the selection is made.

I am confident that if you are an SEO professional that you will find this post interesting reading. That of course is what we all hope for when writing and posting our experiences, questions and other scenarios. That is why I will ask that a level of caution be considered. I am sure that most of us will agree that the domain and its importance in SEO is only a single spoke in a complex wheel of many and that without including all the steps taken in a SEO project that chances of duplicating successful rankings offer but a small chance if any.

My personal experience with URL’s involving newly purchased domains is that the more search demand there is for the actual keyword string being targeted the more the Sandbox filter will present itself.

This should not be confused with the amount of pages indexed by Google displaying the words from the search query. It is purely the number of times searchers are entering and actually searching Google for the exact keyword or string.

It is that simple. The more popular a particular search is the more chance a newly purchased domain with a URL that is targeting the popular search winds up in the Sandbox.

Conclusion. I have successfully managed to capture high search engine rankings involving new domains even with popular keyword searches or strings. However, I have also uncovered a pattern that is suggesting that Google uses the number of searches being made for popular targeted keyword string as a factor in which domains will be placed in the Sandbox. I will usually factor in an additional thirty hours to a SEO project that includes the use of a brand new URL.

Jenie0109

Proficient

Posts: 408

3+ Months Ago

I am not sure if Sandbox really exists or not, but I feel its presence.Whether existing or not, I think it is just right for Google not to let new domains rank very high right away. Those could be spam.